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team negative1 - star wars 1977 - 35mm theatrical version (Released) — Page 95

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Mavimao said:

Darth Lucas said:

Someone make a meme of Gordon Gekko saying "grain is good" please. haha

 You asked for it. You got it. Toyota. 

 haaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhahahahaha.

That was a great show

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You guys used to give updates on what % complete each reel was. Any chance for a current list?

If the majority of the film looks as good as the recent previews, it seems you might be getting close...

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Please give it to us in pie chart form.

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Just wanted to say again that you guys are amazing. I'm more exited for this than for TFA.

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There are no percentages of completion for the reels. We are working simultaneously on a few of them. The samples posted show progress for one of them.

If we get a chance, we'll post more as they are done.

Team Negative1

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Daaaaaaamn but does that preview look good. Fairly low contrast but that was the look of the first movie.

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BuddhaMaster said:

Mavimao said:

Darth Lucas said:

Someone make a meme of Gordon Gekko saying "grain is good" please. haha

 You asked for it. You got it. Toyota. 

 haaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhahahahaha.

That was a great show

Wow, this is definitely my absolute favourite GIF of all time. I love it, and I couldn't agree more. Grain is indeed good. 

Star Wars is Surrealism, not Science Fiction (essay)
Original Trilogy Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Beyond the OT Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Amazon link to my novel; Dawn of the Karabu.

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what's wrong with digital cinematography?

Nobody sang The Bunny Song in years…

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I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but is there going to be a grindhouse release of this like there was for Empire? Will there be for ROTJ? Thanks so much for the work you're doing, and sorry if I'm beating a dead horse.

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There will most likely be a Grindhouse version of Star Wars after the restored version is released.

Team Negative1

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Danfun128 said:

what's wrong with digital cinematography?

Well, of course it depends on who you ask, but a lot of people just don't appreciate (as much as most people) the somewhat flat and hyper-realistic look of digital and much prefer the organic and grainy look of celluloid film. 
There are plenty of pros and cons for using either medium technically, so it mostly just depends on your artistic preference.

But I don't think this is a discussion to start here on this thread.

Star Wars is Surrealism, not Science Fiction (essay)
Original Trilogy Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Beyond the OT Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Amazon link to my novel; Dawn of the Karabu.

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If TN1 will use digital instead of film, I can get them three extra days of shooting from HBO.

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ZkinandBonez-  my opinion about movies shot on digital was negative (for example star wars looked flat as you say), but right now digtal cameras are much better, and I started to love films shot on digital because picture quality is most of the time very consistent, and looks realistic and sharp at the same time. Of course movies shot on film also can look good, but very few film studios care to scan their movies with good results. Few days ago I saw Edward scissorhands, and that movie received 4K remaster, and picture quality was superb. But again, very few movies (shot on film) looks like that, most of the time we get fuzzy and overprocessed picture with lots od DNR in order to mask film grain.

4K BD format will come out soon, and so I hope that we will see some quality remasters in regards to movies shot on film, maybe we will even see official high budged star wars remaster for 4K BD.

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pawel86ck said:

ZkinandBonez-  my opinion about movies shot on digital was negative (for example star wars looked flat as you say), but right now digtal cameras are much better, and I started to love films shot on digital because picture quality is most of the time very consistent, and looks realistic and sharp at the same time. Of course movies shot on film also can look good, but very few film studios care to scan their movies with good results. Few days ago I saw Edward scissorhands, and that movie received 4K remaster, and picture quality was superb. But again, very few movies (shot on film) looks like that, most of the time we get fuzzy and overprocessed picture with lots od DNR in order to mask film grain.

4K BD format will come out soon, and so I hope that we will see some quality remasters in regards to movies shot on film, maybe we will even see official high budged star wars remaster for 4K BD.

Sure, there's nothing inherently wring with digital, and it has gotten extremely good lately. But I mostly have two big problems with it (or rather it's use);
1. Digital bias - This idea that it's the new upgrade to celluloid really has to stop. It's an ingenious re-approach to getting roughly the same end result, but it's not a replacement. I have no problems with movies being shot digitally, I just wish people would stop referring to the use of film as a "hipster" thing, or calling it "out of date." Digital is an awesome new invention, but it has been over-hyped beyond belief. And film is currently evolving just as much as digital is; it just so happens to have been around for a fair bit longer.
2. Hyper-reality - I really can't stand when a movie is shot at 8k, or 48 frames per second. It's so redundant. I remember reading somewhere that the human eye sees roughly the equivalent of 4k (in digital terms), and that 35 mm film cover roughly the same amount. So why go beyond 4k when making a movie? There's just something so ugly about these 8k movies. I remember seeing The Hobbit and thinking "holy crap, what's wrong with Ian Holm's face!" in the opening scene. There's nothing wrong with it, but in 8k I can see every wrinkle and pore on his face. Heck I wouldn't have been able to see this if I was standing inches from his face in real life.
The whole 48 fps thing bugs me as well. I know people keep saying that the eye sees faster than 24 fps, but I feel like these films kind of proves otherwise. Wave your hand in front of your face and it'll look blurred. Look at any movement in the Hobbit trilogy and everything looks like a high frame rate video-game. 
Digital is fine and all, but I really see no purpose to film anything beyond 4k and 24 fps. The result is a bunch of hyper-realistic, video-game looking mess. It's just a gimmick. It sounds cool, it mirrors current iPhone and flat screen TV ads. "It used to be 4k, but now it's 8k!" It sounds cool, but it's completely redundant. It's just cheap marketing.

All in all though, I just wish it would even out a lot more so that the two mediums could co-exist with much more ease. Film has such a unique, and currently unsuccessfully emulated aesthetic, it would be such a loss to movie culture to lose it. Film also has a lot of financial benefits which no one is talking about either, which really bothers me and kind of confirms that there's a bit of a digital bias going on in the current film industry. 
I'm currently in the process of applying to a film school, and I'm hoping to one day get to direct movies of my own, and I'd be really disappointed if I'd loose the possibility to shoot on film. It has such a natural and organic look to it, and has so many currently unsung benefits. And although I have no problem with other people shooting digitally, I have no interest in using it myself.
(End of rant.

Star Wars is Surrealism, not Science Fiction (essay)
Original Trilogy Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Beyond the OT Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Amazon link to my novel; Dawn of the Karabu.

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 (Edited)

ZkinandBonez said:  Sure, there's nothing inherently wring with digital...

 .. as long as it doesn't squeeze out film.

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I guarantee you that you've not seen the Hobbit projected at 8K - best case scenario it was 4K and probably 2K, which is what a lot of theaters still use (including digital IMAX). But either way you saw a 2K copy of the film, because the whole trilogy went through a 2K DI process. And I think any hyper-realism stemmed from the 48fps, because I felt the whole thing actually lacked detail, especially in people's faces, compared to movies shot on film.

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Chewtobacca said:

ZkinandBonez said:  Sure, there's nothing inherently wring with digital...

 .. as long as it doesn't squeeze out film.

Right, just as I said at the end of my rant. People can shoot digitally for all I care, as long as they don't force me to do it. 

And although I wouldn't start celebrating yet, film has gained some traction this year or so. A few years ago it seemed like it was almost completely gone, but this last year has been a good year for film. And a lot of film schools are beginning to allow their students to shoot film for the first time in several years (which is good news for me.)
So it looks like this "digital revolution" hasn't quite destroyed film as so many announced it had some years ago. There's a still a long way to go though before it starts to properly even out.  

Star Wars is Surrealism, not Science Fiction (essay)
Original Trilogy Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Beyond the OT Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Amazon link to my novel; Dawn of the Karabu.

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 (Edited)

Harmy said:

I guarantee you that you've not seen the Hobbit projected at 8K - best case scenario it was 4K and probably 2K, which is what a lot of theaters still use (including digital IMAX). But either way you saw a 2K copy of the film, because the whole trilogy went through a 2K DI process. And I think any hyper-realism stemmed from the 48fps, because I felt the whole thing actually lacked detail, especially in people's faces, compared to movies shot on film.

Fair enough, I used a bad example. But regardless there's a lot of HD-hype currently going on, and it seems very pointless. And even though they probably weren't filmed in as high a resolution as 8k, a lot of the digitally shot films I've seen in the last few years have always looked very hyper-real, which I don't think really compliments them. But the 48 fps thing is definitely something I hope don't catch on.
Digital is a weird thing; it either feels like it has less quality than film, or it kind of overcompensates. 

Either way, I'm not an expert on either digital or film, but The Hobbit and several other digital films I've seen just feels 'off" in a way I can't accurately describe in any other way than "artificial" and "hyper-real."

Star Wars is Surrealism, not Science Fiction (essay)
Original Trilogy Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Beyond the OT Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Amazon link to my novel; Dawn of the Karabu.

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ZkinandBonez said:  Right, just as I said at the end of my rant.

 Look again.

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Chewtobacca said:

ZkinandBonez said:  Right, just as I said at the end of my rant.

 Look again.

 
Am I missing something here?

ZkinandBonez said:  All in all though, I just wish it would even out a lot more so that the two mediums could co-exist with much more ease. Film has such a unique, and currently unsuccessfully emulated aesthetic, it would be such a loss to movie culture to lose it. Film also has a lot of financial benefits which no one is talking about either, which really bothers me and kind of confirms that there's a bit of a digital bias going on in the current film industry

I'm currently in the process of applying to a film school, and I'm hoping to one day get to direct movies of my own, and I'd be really disappointed if I'd loose the possibility to shoot on film. It has such a natural and organic look to it, and has so many currently unsung benefits. And although I have no problem with other people shooting digitally, I have no interest in using it myself.

(End of rant.) 

Star Wars is Surrealism, not Science Fiction (essay)
Original Trilogy Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Beyond the OT Documentaries/Making-Ofs (YouTube, Vimeo, etc. finds)
Amazon link to my novel; Dawn of the Karabu.

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Time
 (Edited)

ZkinandBonez said:

pawel86ck said:

ZkinandBonez-  my opinion about movies shot on digital was negative (for example star wars looked flat as you say), but right now digtal cameras are much better, and I started to love films shot on digital because picture quality is most of the time very consistent, and looks realistic and sharp at the same time. Of course movies shot on film also can look good, but very few film studios care to scan their movies with good results. Few days ago I saw Edward scissorhands, and that movie received 4K remaster, and picture quality was superb. But again, very few movies (shot on film) looks like that, most of the time we get fuzzy and overprocessed picture with lots od DNR in order to mask film grain.

4K BD format will come out soon, and so I hope that we will see some quality remasters in regards to movies shot on film, maybe we will even see official high budged star wars remaster for 4K BD.

Sure, there's nothing inherently wring with digital, and it has gotten extremely good lately. But I mostly have two big problems with it (or rather it's use);
1. Digital bias - This idea that it's the new upgrade to celluloid really has to stop. It's an ingenious re-approach to getting roughly the same end result, but it's not a replacement. I have no problems with movies being shot digitally, I just wish people would stop referring to the use of film as a "hipster" thing, or calling it "out of date." Digital is an awesome new invention, but it has been over-hyped beyond belief. And film is currently evolving just as much as digital is; it just so happens to have been around for a fair bit longer.
2. Hyper-reality - I really can't stand when a movie is shot at 8k, or 48 frames per second. It's so redundant. I remember reading somewhere that the human eye sees roughly the equivalent of 4k (in digital terms), and that 35 mm film cover roughly the same amount. So why go beyond 4k when making a movie? There's just something so ugly about these 8k movies. I remember seeing The Hobbit and thinking "holy crap, what's wrong with Ian Holm's face!" in the opening scene. There's nothing wrong with it, but in 8k I can see every wrinkle and pore on his face. Heck I wouldn't have been able to see this if I was standing inches from his face in real life.
The whole 48 fps thing bugs me as well. I know people keep saying that the eye sees faster than 24 fps, but I feel like these films kind of proves otherwise. Wave your hand in front of your face and it'll look blurred. Look at any movement in the Hobbit trilogy and everything looks like a high frame rate video-game. 
Digital is fine and all, but I really see no purpose to film anything beyond 4k and 24 fps. The result is a bunch of hyper-realistic, video-game looking mess. It's just a gimmick. It sounds cool, it mirrors current iPhone and flat screen TV ads. "It used to be 4k, but now it's 8k!" It sounds cool, but it's completely redundant. It's just cheap marketing.

All in all though, I just wish it would even out a lot more so that the two mediums could co-exist with much more ease. Film has such a unique, and currently unsuccessfully emulated aesthetic, it would be such a loss to movie culture to lose it. Film also has a lot of financial benefits which no one is talking about either, which really bothers me and kind of confirms that there's a bit of a digital bias going on in the current film industry. 
I'm currently in the process of applying to a film school, and I'm hoping to one day get to direct movies of my own, and I'd be really disappointed if I'd loose the possibility to shoot on film. It has such a natural and organic look to it, and has so many currently unsung benefits. And although I have no problem with other people shooting digitally, I have no interest in using it myself.
(End of rant.

 Think about what you are saying for a moment, if your eyes only see about 4K resolution, then watching a film in 4K or 8K, you would see no difference at all, as your eye wouldn't detect the extra resolution.

As for 48fps and the moving your hand in front of your face, again, if your eyes were blurring the movement, then the 48fps of your hand would look just as blurry as the 24fps of your hand, as your vision would be doing the blurring between the frames.

Also, there is no way you saw The Hobbit projected in 8K, I don't know of any 8K cinemas anywhere, and there certainly wasn't an 8K version produced for distribution. What you saw was 2K, so you certainly weren't overwhelmed with detail that was more than your eyes could perceive, as you thought was the case. The reality is that Hobbit in particular suffered from a few problems.

1) To get 48fps, they had to throw a lot more light at the actors and the sets, this made lighting far more difficult, and it simply wasn't lit as well as the the LotR trilogy. This resulted in seeing more of the flaws in the makeup, costumes and sets.

2) 3D. To get 48fps and 3D, and keep the images clear, they went for a deep depth of field, as it keeps more in focus. Particularly in the Hobbiton internal scenes where the sets are not physically large, this resulted in nearly everything being over-lit, and everything in-focus. It also required greater compression rates. There is little leading of the eye in these scenes.

These two things gave it that Soap Opera/TV feel, the flat-ish lighting, the higher compression rates smoothing out detail, and the deep DoF resulting in everything being in focus, yet smoothed out a bit by compression. They got better at it as the film went on, and when they could shoot outside, the second half of the film looks much more natural than the first 45 minutes. The Hobbit is a flawed production, it looked just as bad in a 2D, 24fps cinema, i wasn't really the framerates etc. that were the problem, it was the crew struggling with finding how to shoot this way, and making a bit of a botch of it. This is to be expected when trying something for the first time, but it is a shame they didn't nail it, as many people now hold The Hobbit up as the example of why 48fps looks terrible.

As for film being unique, and not currently emulated, well, that just isn't true, we did a test screening with 11 film based directors quite a few years ago now, showed the same sequence shot on film vs shot on digital, and not one of them could reliably pick which was which. You can make digital look just like film if you want to, but most are now starting to explore the ways to utilise the extra fidelity, light sensitivity and dynamic range that digital offers to find new ways to tell stories.

The reason you find the clarity of 4K, and the high frame rate disturbing, is that you have had pretty much your entire life, being trained to see narrow depth of field, soft images, low dynamic range, raised blacks and 24fps blur as 'cinematic'. All of those limitations of film, became the language of film, and directors started using those limitations and working with them to create that language.

So a narrow depth of field is used to lead the eye where the director wants you to look, it is used particularly with slow focus pulls to show beauty, not necessarily because it is beautiful, but they have shot beautiful things and people that way for the last 100 years, so we have learned to read and assimilate that language, and it kicks off an emotional response.

Had film from the get-go been 48fps and film stocks much faster allowing for deeper DoF, then a different language would have appeared, and we would think of high resolution, sharp, 48fps as being the 'film look' and not liking whatever came along and replaced it.

You can make digital look just like film now if you want, and 100+ years of artistic language doesn't just go away, especially because it works, but a new language will evolve, and new generations will prefer its look.

The new dolby HDR laser projection is just astounding, it makes film look terrible in comparison, I think it will be much more important that resolution going forwards, it brings a range of options to directors that will enhance story-telling and sense of presence greatly.

Time marches on, things improve, we old dinosaurs don't like change. There are truly beautiful, artistically stunning digital movies being made now, and there are awful, soap-opera digital movies being made now, just as there was 50 years ago. The great movies and stories will look marvellous shot on digital or film, it is down to the talents of the crew, and the story to be told.

If you want to shoot on film, no-one is stopping you, Kodak is making 35mm film for at least the next decade, 16mm film is abundant, and you can even buy Super8 film if the mood takes you.

But if you do become a good director, the medium will be mostly irrelevant, you should be able to tell your story, capture your audience and create something that will mesmerise, regardless of the aquisition method.

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 (Edited)

I have to disagree with your point a little bit.

Obviously you are correct, if the human eye can only resolve 4K, then a 4K and 8k image would be indistinguishable, the eye is the bottleneck. However, in my personal experience, this isn't quite true.

I can't play video games, whenever I try I get horrible headaches. I searched around and found out that the reason for this is the camera movement in a game. In the real world when I run, a lot of the images my eyes see are shakey or blurry... However my brain filters these useless images out.

When I play a video game however, this doesn't happen. Every jump, run, camera shake, motion blur, it is all pumped from the game, into my brain without being filtered. Ten minutes later I have a headache and need to rest.

That is a situation where the bottleneck for real events is different that the bottleneck when receiving images on a screen.

Or something like Cloverfield, the camera shake caused some people to become nauseous in the cinema. However those people could probably ride a bike on a bumpy road without a problem.

I have no idea why this happens and it seems completely counterintuitive, but the brain must be handling certain things differently.

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The brain doesn't handle resolution differently whether it comes from a digital or film source, what you are describing is a movement problem.

In both games, and handheld-shot movies like Cloverfield, there is a disconnect between your eyes telling you "I am moving aroung like crazy" and your inner ear telling you "Nope, I am sitting quite still thank you". *

You brain has a few options on how to interperate this, for people like you that get headachey and/or motion sick (my daughter cannot watch Cloverfied for more than 2 mins), the brain decides that if I am standing still, but the world is moving around me, then there is a fair chance I have been poisoned/ate dodgy food and so it triggers a sickness repsonse, and if you keep going, will most likely cause you to throw up, to help purge your body of what it perceives to be likely caused by a dodgy meal.

Rapid camera movement will cause this response in you whether done on film or in a game or a digital movie. The reason you don't get motion sick when watching movies shot on film, is that directors refrain from moving the camera quickly, as the 24fps makes the blur so bad that you can't tell at all what is happening on screen, so they simply don't have the option to do it.

Cloverfield was shown on film in many cinemas, it hat the same stomach churning results as when it was shown in the digital cinemas.

*(Brain Research Bulletin Volume 47, Issue 5, 15 November 1998, Pages 481–487)

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That is one reason. Another similar one is saccadic masking.

When eyes are moving, the brain discards certain images. I just quickly looked from the left to the right. I saw the window on my left and the chair to my right, however in the middle of that pan I was effectively blind.

My brain knew my eyes were moving and would have no idea what stable information, so discarded that. When the video game camera moves, my brain is not informed and so fails to discard.